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How Kathleen Wynne righted Liberal wrongs by lurching left: Cohn

SAULT STE. MARIE, ONT. — By rights, Kathleen Wynne should be on her last legs — burdened by a tarnished Liberal brand, battered by allegations of corruption, buffeted by the winds of change.

But on the campaign trail, as on the jogging trail, the underdog is defying expectations. In her first provincial campaign, the rookie Liberal leader is keeping a steady pace — delivering speeches in her trademark sparkling red Converse sneakers and lacing up those Saucony jogging shoes daily.

Ontario Liberal leader Kathleen Wynne laughs at a campaign stop in Markham on Wednesday. The Liberal leader vows to introduce "exactly the same budget" as she did this spring if her party is re-elected. (Frank Gunn / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

Polls suggest a see-saw battle between her and Tory Leader Tim Hudak (while the NDP’s Andrea Horwath is still trailing, not surging). With all those inherited Liberal scandals and boondoggles, why is Wynne even in the running?

On present trends, voters could well elect another minority legislature on June 12 — leaving us just about back where we started. At which point Wynne intends to pick up where she left off.

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Interviewed during a whirlwind campaign stop, the Liberal leader vows to reintroduce her May 1 budget unchanged.

“It’s going to be exactly the same budget — and it will be the plan that everyone will have had many weeks now to look at,” she says, holed up in a Holiday Inn room before boarding her Liberal campaign charter.

Like the hotel and the flight plan, there will be no surprises. But after all the bad blood between her and Horwath — who keeps claiming Wynne is a lynchpin of “Liberal corruption” — can they still work together?

“Yeah,” Wynne sighs, considering the question. “An election campaign is a very intense, heated period and feelings flare. But that’s not going to influence how I would interact with the leaders no matter what my role is.”

On the campaign trail, however, she is talking over Horwath’s head. Just as the NDP is wooing disaffected Liberal and Tory voters, Wynne is trying to peel away progressives by tapping into their visceral fears of Hudak’s Tory platform.

“My pitch . . . is that the threat of Tim Hudak and the program that he’s putting forward would stop us in our tracks,” she tells me.

While Wynne seemed flustered by the ferocity of Horwath’s (unproven) corruption allegations this week, she makes no apologies for ramping up the rhetoric against Progressive Conservative proposals to eliminate 100,000 jobs from the public service. Yet for all her impassioned anti-Tory attacks, Wynne downplays the reality that Liberals are also on a collision course with public servants.

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With a whopping $12.5 billion deficit, and a promise to wipe it out within three years, there can be little doubt of more austerity ahead. The Liberal budget plan specifies interest payments on the nearly $300-billion debt will rise from $10.6 billion to $14.2 billion by 2017-18. It allocates no new money for wage increases, which is why restive teachers are braced for conflict when their contracts expire this summer (after a two-year wage freeze essentially imposed by her predecessor, Dalton McGuinty).

Her explanation?

“What Dalton McGuinty did in the last year of our government was to change the relationship between government and the education workers,” she tells me, frowning. “It wasn’t a process that worked, and I’ve been very clear about that.”

If Dalton was Doctor No in his last years in power (and Doctor Death on the gas plants), Wynne sounds suspiciously like Doctor Yes on the campaign trail. At every stop on her northern tour, she reassures anxious voters that she has softened McGuinty’s austerity plans for racetracks, casinos, transportation and teachers.

In their updated campaign plan — an elaboration of the May 1 budget — the Liberals have promised something for everyone: $1 billion for the Ring of Fire, cuts and caps on hospital parking fees (long overdue), more phys-ed and math for students, an innovative new pension plan (building on the CPP), and higher wages for the working poor.

But there is a price to pay for trying to be all things to all northerners, southerners, easterners and southwesterners. Just as Hudak’s math doesn’t add up, and Horwath’s contortions don’t make sense, Wynne’s numbers likely won’t hold up after the ballots are counted.

There will be pain no matter who wins power. Pick your poison — progressive with Wynne, populist with Horwath, or perilous with Hudak.

But for now, on the campaign trail, Wynne is on a roll. As the June 12 finish line looms, the 61-year-old comeback kid is running for her political life.

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